Genre: Musical, Comedy, Sci-Fi
Literally out-of-this-world, The American Astronaut is a post-Eraserhead, black-and-white comedy set on an asteroid that serves as an outpost for desperadoes, mad scientists, and paranoid travelers. Director Cory McAbee, frontman for the dynamic, experimental rock band the Billy Nayer Show, has constructed a seedy, surreal vision of conquered space that includes rocket ships operated by junkyard parts, barflies with a increasingly pathological sense of humor, and handguns that reduce people to a bucket's worth of sand. In this nightmarish, sometimes funny, sometimes tedious fantasy noir, a distressed astronaut (McAbee) agrees to swap a caged, embryonic female for a captive male on one planet and deliver the latter to the man-hungry (if peculiarly antebellum) women of Venus. The film doesn't necessarily hold up as a singular work, but there are several remarkable sequences, including a dance number in a scummy restroom and an unsettling comedy routine. Special features include an interesting interview with McAbee. --Tom Keogh